Give Thanks No More:
It’s Time for a National Day of Atonementby Robert Jensen
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 23, 2005

One
indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement
of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National
Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a
model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day
of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking
Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European
invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday
impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans
into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy
and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United
States.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal
brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies
are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin --
the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It’s
now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the
United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an
inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim,
history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with
Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we
Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom
took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly
Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to
a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it’s also true
that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving
for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and
children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land
to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the
continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been
exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die
off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and,
sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population)
celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men
we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying
Indians’ land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving
“wild beasts” from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, “both being
beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” Thomas Jefferson -- president #3
and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as
the “merciless Indian Savages” -- was known to romanticize Indians and their
culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of
war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, “[W]e shall destroy all
of them.”

As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore
Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the
continent as an inevitable process “due solely to the power of the mighty
civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by
their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the
barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.” Roosevelt also once said, “I
don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but
I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely
into the case of the tenth.”

How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered
historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually
identical to Nazis? Here’s how “respectable” politicians, pundits, and
professors play the game:

When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is
all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and
there is much hand wringing about the younger generations’ lack of knowledge
about, and respect for, that history. In the United States, we hear
constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous
spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who
“settled” the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn
these things.

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and
interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people
uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the
foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value
of history drops precipitously and one is asked, “Why do you insist on
dwelling on the past?”

This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can
extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at
the same time, argue that we shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about
history.

This off-and-on engagement with history isn’t of mere academic interest; as
the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in
the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths
about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American
benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures
-- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent
action.

Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream
culture. After raising the barbarism of America’s much-revered founding
fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to “humble our proud
nation” and “undermine young people’s faith in our country.”

Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should
practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when
combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.

History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into
controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has
created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to
talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political
movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical
fact. Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony.

History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it
can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won’t set us free, but the
telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.

As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty
of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on
their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects
on the day’s mythology on our minds.